Wayne Shorter’s ‘The Soothsayer’ Joins Blue Note Classic Vinyl Series
The 1965 album will be officially available starting on August 15.
Blue Note Records has set their Classic Vinyl Series picks for August 2025, and one of them will be Wayne Shorter’s The Soothsayer. Originally released in 1965, The Soothsayer sees the saxophonist lead his sextet over six tracks. Blue Note’s The Soothsayer vinyl release is scheduled for August 15.
In the early and mid-1960s, Shorter was especially prolific. In 1964 alone, the saxophonist released Night Dreamer, JuJu, and Speak No Evil, the latter of which is often considered his masterpiece. Even so, he was back in the studio just two months later to start laying down what would become The Soothsayer. “If you’re not on the road, you were preparing to record to maintain yourself, whether you’re single or married,” Shorter recalled of this productive era in an interview with Jazz Weekly years later. “But that was where income came from. It was, like you did it all in one move. You came home from the road and you thought about recording and then you would do it. You would record so you could stand on your own feet at that time.”
The Soothsayer features Shorter on lead tenor saxophone, with support from Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, James Spaulding on alto saxophone, McCoy Tyner on piano, Ron Carter on bass, and Tony Williams on drums. Of the six tracks on the album, five are Shorter compositions while the final track, “Valse Triste,” is Shorter’s arrangement of Finnish composer Jean Sibelius’ original.
Over the course of his career, Shorter won 11 Grammy Awards, and was nominated for 11 more. In 1996, the Montreal Jazz Festival awarded Shorter the Miles Davis Award for lifetime achievement, and he received a non-competitive Grammy Award for lifetime achievement in 2014. Shorter stayed active up until the end of his life in 2023, collaborating with one of the next generation’s great jazz musicians, Esperanza Spaulding, on his final recording.
